Grad School Lowdown: Grad School vs. Real World

Graduating from college feels so good. Walking out of the building after taking your last final exam or turning in your last essay, you feel as though you’ve lost that pesky freshman fifteen in a matter of seconds.

Being finished is strange, too, and for the first time in a long time, you finally feel like you’re not forgetting to do something. You celebrate, participate in a ceremony and are congratulated by friends and family. And then, if it hasn’t already, reality sinks in. You’ve just invested at least four years and tens of thousands of dollars in your education, and now you have to do something with it.

At this point, your career might take any shape, and may not necessarily have anything to do with your major. Former poet laureate Ted Kooser wrote a poem called “The Possible Lives” on the subject, which begins “There were once so many I might choose among, / like a warehouse of coats and shoes and all my size. / Walking the streets I imagined myself in every house, / happy with whichever woman might be living there.” Notice that the first line is written in the past tense, and that the speaker of the poem has already made the decisions that changed his life into “the only one” he could have had.

Of course, living in any house or having any career is probably not a realistic option. Your options will probably be something more like this: start working, travel, join a service organization (like the Peace Corps), or apply to graduate school. When considering graduate school, you will have to think about whether you want to go straight from working on one degree into working on another, or if you’d like to take some time off.

Many careers do not require a graduate degree; however, getting one can provide you with more earning and advancement potential. Some fields do require an advanced degree, such as those in medicine, justice and academia. If your career of choice requires such a degree, or if you feel you would really benefit from earning one, you should search for the ideal program with focus and attention to detail. But that search need not necessarily take place during your last year of college, so that you can begin the next fall. After spending four years within the university environment, you have to ask yourself: I am ready to spend another two or three or more doing research, writing essays, and taking exams?

Unless you feel passionately that you should go straight into a graduate program, “taking time off”—and by that I mean working or traveling—has a lot of attractive benefits. You gain experience and, hopefully, confidence, and you can avoid sequestering yourself within the relative safety and privilege an academic environment provides.

As someone who went more or less from college into graduate school, I find I have a certain anxiety about entering the workforce that my friends who made different decisions do not seem to have. Although I’ve had several different jobs during and after college, I really don’t feel like I have been pursuing my career professionally outside of the university environment. I have been relying on stipends, scholarships and student loans for the last six years. That is a long time to plan a career, and it is a long time to wonder how the professional world will respond to me when I finally enter it.

I think that my friends who began working shortly after college have a financial leg-up on me as well. Many of them have good jobs with benefits, and are working on paying off the debts they accrued in college, or even adding to their savings. When you go straight from college into graduate school, especially if you don’t plan on working while earning your advanced degree (and sometimes you can’t), you stay in the very low income bracket of the student. This is not necessarily a problem, but if you do it for many years without taking “a break” to experience another way of living, it can become difficult to imagine having a “real life” in which you “make money” and maybe even “own a home.”

The decision you make for yourself will really depend on the opportunities offered to you, or the ones you take the initiative to seek out and apply for. If you are eager and can handle a lot of multitasking, one approach would be to apply to a few jobs, a few graduate schools, and maybe Americorps, or a program in which you can teach English in a foreign country. This way, you will have options when the summer after graduation rolls around. You may find that a company is happy to hire you based on your current credentials, or you may receive a full ride to graduate school, or perhaps your relatives abroad will invite you to come and live with them for a year.

On the other hand you may be one of those people who has always wanted to be a doctor, and is dying to get into medical school. Or you may be a philosopher at heart who really wants to become a professor in a research university. As I mentioned, if you feel passionately about continuing your education as soon as possible—or, perhaps, getting it over with—it is not necessary to think of gaining worldly experience and being a student as a dichotomy. Depending on your program, it is entirely likely that while you are on breaks from classes, you can go abroad or get an internship or start freelance writing. What else is student loan money there for, if not for providing you with the experiences that will benefit you in the future?